Certain types of customers have unusual demands on office equipment. It is conceivable that a customer would like a printer (the term “printer” including a printer, copier, or multifunction device, such as including facsimile scanning and printing) to have a roughly similar output rate, in terms of number of printed sheets per minute, regardless of the size and/or process orientation of the sheets coming out of the printer (long-edge feed or short-edge feed). In one practical situation, a customer may desire that the output rate for letter-size long-edge feed sheets and legal-size short-edge feed sheets be roughly equal.
It is known that a basic hardware “platform” of a given type of printing apparatus, such as a xerographic printer, can be readily controlled, such as via software, to have a particular output speed: predetermined voltages can be applied to motors, data can be sent to a laser at a predetermined rate, etc. More specifically, larger xerographic printers can be controlled to have a certain number of “pitches”, or page-size image areas, associated with each rotation of a rotatable photoreceptor drum or belt. By controlling the machine to have more or fewer images of a given size placed on the photoreceptor with each rotation, the speed of the apparatus, in terms of output prints per minute, can be altered.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,588,284; 5,455,656; and 5,933,679 describe control systems in which a xerographic copier with a multi-pitch photoreceptor belt is controllable to operate with a selectable number of active pitches per belt rotation. U.S. Pat. No. 6,844,937 describes a system in which a digital printer can operate at one of a set of selectable output rates, with a different per-print “click charge” to a user depending on the selected print output rate.